Week 10: From Tobacco Plantation to "Pharming" - Agriculture in Virginia

Objectives For the Class

• First, we interrupt this program to bring you:
• Back in 2012...
• Background for the November 8, 2016 Election (Be the smartest person in the room watching the results get announced on Tuesday night. Even if your candidates don't win, you can talk about "wait until next year..." in 2017.)

grass strips, left unplowed between crop rows, reduce erosion
Source: Environmental Protection Agency, Chesapeake Bay - Making Progress

• Agriculture Past: Native American Agriculture in Virginia
• did Virginia's first farmers start with the "three sisters" of corn, squash, and beans?
• Agriculture Present: Virginia Agriculture - Facts And Figures provides a quick agriculture overview.
• Virginia has engaged in international trade since the early 1500's, when the first European ships stopped on the coastline for fresh water and to seek gold and/or slaves. Virginia has been exporting agricultural products since John Rolfe realized sweet-scented tobacco could make a profit.
• Until the American Revolution, England was Virginia's primary customer for agricultural exports, though colonists also exported wheat, pork, and other food to islands growing sugar in the Caribbean. Which country is Virginia's #1 agricultural destination now?
• what percentage of Virginia farms are owned and operated by individuals/families vs. large corporations?

few Virginia farms are larger than 180 acres, so few Virginia farmers can justify buying large tractors or other expensive equipment (unlike large farms in the Midwest)
Source: 2007 Census of Agriculture, Virginia

• 2016 Agriculture Overview
• Tobacco in Virginia
• Virginia colonists were not the first to introduce tobacco to Virginia. Native Americans first domesticated the plant in the Andes, and brought tobacco north (like corn) to be grown in Virginia.
• Virginia colonists were not the first to introduce tobacco to Europe. The Spanish imported their tobacco from Central America and the Caribbean islands long before the English considered establishing a colony in North America, starting with Sir Walter Ralegh. English men (and probably some women) had been smoking tobacco imported by the Spanish for nearly a century before John Rolfe sent his first barrel of brown, dried leaves to London.
• London merchants got few profits from a tobacco business dominated by the Spanish. King James I of England even tried to stop smoking in England. He issued A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, describing smoking as "A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."¹
• The "sweet scented" tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) raised in Virginia became popular, and profitable. Starting in the 1650's, the English government required Virginia to export all tobacco to England, using only English ships. That blocked competition from Dutch and French buyers and lowered profits in Virginia - but the mercantilist philosophy presumed that colonies were supposed to make people rich in the mother country, not in the colonies.
• The king's government profited from tobacco taxes. Merchants in England controlled the business as middlemen, and they profited as the Virginia crop was re-exported from England and sold in France, Portugal, and Spain. The only way Virginians could ship tobacco directly to the European continent was to use smugglers to avoid taxes and middlemen in England who siphoned off the profits. The economic impacts of the 1650's decision to limit trade triggered colonists such as George Washington and John Hancock to support independence from England 125 years later.

Pop Quiz

Question: In Halifax County, what percentage of farmers would grow burley tobacco?

Answer: None, of course. Burley is grown west of the Blue Ridge, and Halifax is east of the mountains

  
counties growing burley (left) and flue-cured tobacco (right) in 2008
Source: US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS)

• Tobacco and Colonial Population
• John Rolfe made "sweet-scented" tobacco a commercial product that justified the London's Company's continued venture capital investment in Virginia, until Opechancanough led the 1622 uprising. King James cancelled the company's charter and converted Virginia from a private corporation into a royal colony in 1624... and the king got the profits from taxing tobacco until 1776.
• Tobacco is a "13 month" crop. There were no tractors or mechanized farm machinery in colonial times. Tobacco required massive amounts of hand work to plant, grow, harvest, and then process for export. The Virginia colonists chose to use slave labor in order to make money from tobacco (profit for the slaveowners, not the slaves, of course). In contrast, less physical effort was required to grow wheat, flax, potatoes, and other crops in New England where colonists owned slaves, but slavery was not a fundamental part of the economy.

Virginia established a tobacco-based economy despite the opposition of King James I to smoking
Source: Library of Virginia, King James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 1604

• Tobacco and Staple Agriculture
• There are four "curing" methods used for drying tobacco grown for commercial purposes. Flue-curing, fire-curing, air-curing and sun-curing create a dry leaf that can be stored without being damaged by mold.
• After curing, tobacco is aged, chopped, packed into a tobacco pouch or rolled into a cigar/cigarette, and finally burned so customers inhale smoke. The process by which tobacco is cured affects the taste of the smoke, as well as the speed in which it burns. It is an art form as well as a science challenge to create a cigarette that burns, but burns slowly rather than creates a flash fire.
• Flue-cured tobacco is harvested differently from burley tobacco.
• A burley tobacco plant is cut at the base of the stalk, dried on a stick by air in a barn with lots of ventilation. Farmers make one pass through the field to harvest the entire crop.
• Flue-cured tobacco is harvested one leaf at a time. Farm workers go through the field multiple times in July/August/September as the leaves ripen, harvesting the bottom leaves that ripen first and finishing with the top leaves that ripen last. Workers sitting on sleds pulled by tractors must use arms and hands to cut off/pull off the leaves one at a time. "Pickin' tobacco" is hard work involving much hand labor, comparable to "pickin' cotton" in the past.
• After tobacco is cured, different types are blended together to develop a distinctive taste in the cigarette or pipe. Cheap cigarettes might be flavored by chemicals such as menthol which dominate the taste of low-quality tobacco. (In the same way, the taste of cheap alcohol was covered up by additives in the days of Prohibition when the "cocktail" was developed. The taste of a rum-and-coke is dominated by the soda pop additive, not the quality of the rum.)
• I worked on the tobacco market in the 1970's, and we collected floor sweepings from the North Carolina plant where we packed cured tobacco leaves into hogsheads. Those floor sweepings were added into the middle of cheap cigars flavored with licorice or other chemicals - at least, that was our understanding of where the floor sweepings were used.

leaves are picked one at a time, starting as they ripen at the bottom, from tobacco plants grown for flue-curing

• Tobacco Markets in Virginia
• Philip Morris headquarters are located in Richmond, Virginia, where the company's cigarette manufacturing is also concentrated. Look for the Marlboro signs on I-95 south of the James River, just before Colonial Heights. The parent company is called Altria now. (Philip Morris was a man who ran a retail tobacco shop on London's Bond Street, starting in 1847.)
• Cigarettes did not become popular until after the 1861-65 American Civil War. Pipes, snuff, and cigars were popular far earlier than cigarettes. Cigarettes were thought to be "sissy..." until the 1900's. Clay pipes were popular in colonial Virginia, and so common that archeologists have measured how the width of the pipe stem changed over time. Tiny pieces of clay pipes can be used to accurately determine the date of an archeological site.
• Cigars were the most popular form of tobacco use after the Civil War. In 1901, "3.5 billion cigarettes and 6 billion cigars are sold. Four in five American men smoke at least one cigar a day."²

tobacco, topped and untopped with flowers, at Mount Vernon

• George Washington and Slavery (it was all about tobacco at first...)
• At the age of 11, George Washington became a slaveowner when his father died. He remained a slaveowner throughout his entire life.
• Washington had slaves on his farms, but he also had slaves in his house. As President between 1888-96, he relied upon slaves to maintain his household in New York City Philadelphia. He was upset when Oney Judge, who provided services to Martha Washington, fled to freedom in New Hampshire rather than return to Mount Vernon.
• Washington made money from tobacco farms near the Pamunkey River, on land he acquired when he married Martha. He abandoned tobacco farming at his Mount Vernon mansion and tried growing wheat and other ways of making money there, including fishing and making whiskey - but he always relied upon a cheap labor force of slaves.
• One argument used in Southern states to justify slavery before 1861: the "peculiar system" provided a form of lifetime welfare to young and old slaves. In Northern states, free laborers were left to fend on their own if they were unable to work and "wage slavery" there provided no support in retirement.
• George Washington was not Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, but he was no stick-in-the-mud traditionalist. Washington led a rebellion to replace the political/economic system where English mercantilists constrained his opportunity to make a profit in Virginia. He was an innovator who fertilized his fields when few farmers did so, and had his slaves collect compost and manure in a "dungery" to recycle as fertilizer. He built a whiskey distillery in order to add value to his grain crops rather than sell just flour, and became one of the largest producers of whiskey in America.
• Washington built a unique 16-sided barn, a creative blend of architecture and machinery. Wheat was laid out on the floor of the second story, and horses walked on the wheat to separate the seeds from the stalk. As the horse hoofs "threshed" the wheat, the seeds fell through cracks in the floorboards and were safely stored on the bottom floor where theft was more difficult.³
• Constructing and operating a mill required capital, land, and technical expertise - so if you know anyone with a last name of Miller, they may have an ancestor who was more-than-average smart.
• George Washington's Farms and Their Contents, December 1793
• The historic map at Library of Congress shows Washington's five farms in Fairfax County

Mount Vernon today - is "Stratford On The Potomac" located on the Mansion House Farm, Muddy Hole Farm, or River Farm?

• Washington had enough land to manage each farm differently:
  • Mansion House farm
  • Mount Vernon was headquarters for a man who was far more involved with his farming operations than a modern "gentleman farmer." While in winter camp during the American Revolution, Washington wrote letters to Mount Vernon to guide how his farms in Virginia would be managed.
  • How would you feel if you raised the best tobacco in the colony but did not get a better price than the neighbor? Think you'd like to change the system - perhaps stop growing tobacco for export, and maybe even lead a revolution?
  • River Farm
  • Note that in the references, the highest and best use (a term used to appraise the value of property) anticipated for the area labeled "D" was housing rather than agriculture:
  • Is cleared land, and might be added to River Farm; or if that farm should be sub-divided, it might form part of the smaller ones, affording pleasant sites for houses on the river - even 200 years ago, Northern Virginia landowners were thinking about converting farmland into subdivisions
  • George Washington was a developer, as well as a conservationist trying to conserve his soil
  • Union Farm
  • was every acre dedicated to row crops like wheat, or was some land used to grow clover for grazing horses and other animals?)
  • In the 1790's, before every large town had a Wal*Mart or Home Depot selling artificial fertilizers packed in convenient bags, farmers like Washington would restore the fertility of a field by growing clover and tilling the crop back into the soil as "green manure."
  • Clover is a plant that "fixes nitrogen." It pulls nitrogen from the air and converts it, via bacteria in the root system, into a form of nitrogen than can be used by plants as a natural fertilizer.
  • Such practices meant the farmer would get no income from the field that year, so many farmers still preferred to abandon old fields and move further inland to clear trees and plant crops in fresh fields... until the nutrients in that soil were exhausted in 2-5 years.
  • Without green manure, "brown" animal manure, or some other form of fertilization, an abandoned old field might require 10-30 years or more before becoming fertile again.
  • If you wear out the land in 2-5 years, you need a constant supply of "fresh land."

a pasture with clover has more nutritional value than a pasture with just grass
Source: Cornell, The "Perfect" Sheep Pasture

• Virginia's Cession of the Northwest Territory
• Farming practices shaped the form of government adopted after the American Revolution.
• If you are constantly claiming new land parcels, you also need a government organized enough to manage property records and powerful enough to protect private property rights from squatters. The "land hunger" that spurred immigrants to come to Virginia since 1607 required a stronger central government that existed after the American Revolution, when England delayed leaving its fort at Detroit.
• Key members of the Virginia gentry were concerned the new national government would not force the English and Native Americans out of the Northwest Territory. Virginia had claimed all the lands northwest of the Ohio River based on its 1609 charter, but ceded those claims to the central government. After the peace treaty with England was signed in 1783, land speculators feared they would never get hoped-for profits from land sales in the Northwest Territory.
• George Washington spurred a second revolution in 1785-88, when the original contract between the 13 states was rewritten. In a USA 2.0 reboot, the 1781 Articles of Confederation were replaced with the 1788 US Constitution.
• The 1788 contract between the states created a powerful-enough-to-enforce-the-law Federal government. When Pennsylvania farmers refused to pay taxes on whiskey, President Washington sent the US Army to force compliance with Federal laws.
• The Constitution created a central government that was stronger than the individual states. Not all of the Virginia gentry supported that revision. Patrick Henry was also a land speculator, but his properties were in southwestern Virginia. He said he "smelled a rat" after the Philadelphia convention in 1787, and both Henry and George Mason tried to block ratification of the new Constitution. The farmer/land speculator from Mount Vernon won the argument, of course.
• While we are looking at western borders: Virginia-Kentucky Boundary

the windmill at Yorktown in the 1700's was used to grind corn, and Civil War maps recorded the persistence of the place name
Source: Library of Congress, Robert Knox Sneden, Sketch of the lines at Yorktown Virginia April 30th 1862

• Modern farming in Virginia is a tough way to make a living. Large farms in the Midwest have massive investments in large tractors and other machinery to minimize labor costs, but the smaller farms in Virginia are labor-intensive operations. There are people in rural parts of Virginia still willing to work on farms for relatively low wages, but in the urbanizing areas of Northern Virginia, Richmond, and Hampton Roads most workers prefer construction jobs that pay better.
• Farms near urban areas, or near major highways, can add a corn maze or other features to provide entertainment and generate income from tourists as well as specialty crops, beef cattle, or other traditional agricultural sales.
• Fauquier County has not lots its agricultural operations yet, in contrast to Prince William, Fairfax, and Arlington Counties. Check out "Agritainment’" still growing in Cows-N-Corn's 12th year in Fauquier County, showing how tourism can keep farms in operation. (That is a 2012 story. If you want to check out the Leonard family's operation in 2016, see the current calendar.)
• Fairfax County was once a major dairy area, supplying milk to customers in Alexandria and DC until the 1960's. Trains from Prince William County literally included a "milk run," with milk collected at each station as cargo going to processing plants in the District of Columbia.
• The last dairies in Prince William are closing down. It's cost-effective to subdivide and grow houses rather than continue to farm, in areas close to the job centers. The housing boom of the mid-1990's also drew away the low-cost labor into construction jobs. Dairy cows must be milked regularly, while beef cattle require less labor. You still see cows in Prince William County, but no longer see any dairies.
• Tourism may provide a more reliable income than growing crops or cows, but weather is still a key variable.
• Bad weather during the growing season affects the quantity of crops available for sale. In an agritourism "pick your own" operation, rain on a Fall weekend has no impact on what is grown, but can depress sales significantly. (Pumpkins not sold individually by October 31 are fed to the pigs, generating no income for the farmer.)

pumpkin farming is more profitable near urban areas where customers will pick-their-own, eliminating the cost of hiring farm laborers for harvest

• Virginia's Top 20 Farm Commodities
• what commodity is the most valuable in Virginia now - tobacco?
• the US Department of Agriculture defines a "broiler" as a chicken younger than 10 weeks old⁴
• CAUTION: in some reports, "livestock" is often treated differently from "crops" when discussing "commodities" and the status of "hay" can be confusing, because most hay is grown and used on a farm/ranch rather than marketed and sold as a commercial product.
• "Tastes like chicken" may apply to many foods, but in Virginia "poultry" includes turkeys too. In 2016, Virginia poultry producers will raise 17 million turkeys. According to the Bureau of Census QuickFacts, there are 8,382,993 Virginians. Do the math - what is the ratio of turkeys to people in Virginia?⁴
• Virginia exports turkeys to Mexico - where the bird was first domesticated. The Spanish brought some birds back to Europe in the 1500's. Farmers in Turkey were so successful in growing them that Europeans associated the Central American species with Turkey.
• In Virginia, poultry operations are most common in the Shenandoah Valley and on the Eastern Shore. Rockingham County is the center of the turkey industry.
• Chicken houses have become high-tech bioscience operations to convert grain into meat. Chicken houses are becoming "concentrated animal feeding operations" (CAFO's) that require Clean Water Act permits when they discharge manure into waterways. So much chicken manure has been spread on farm fields in Accomack County that some soils are saturated with phosphorous, and farmers are looking for new solutions, including use of poultry "litter" as a renewable biofuel energy source for generating electricity.

turkeys as well as chickens are raised in structures that qualify as "concentrated animal feeding operations" (CAFO's)
Source: West Virginia Department of Agriculture, Meat and Poultry Inspection

concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO's) or "factory farms" raising poultry are most common in Augusta, Rockbridge, and Page counties in the Shenandoah Valley
Source: Food and Water Watch - Factory Farm Watch, Virginia - Poultry

• Virginia's Top Agricultural Export Markets
• In 2011, Morocco was the #1 export partner, and soybean oil was the single largest exported commodity to that country.
• Today, Virginia farmers are increasing sales of chicken and soybeans to a new #1 export partner: China.
• Virginia Agriculture

a high percentage of Virginia farms earn less than $10,000 per year, indicating that farming is often a part-time occupation or hobby
Source: United States Department of Agriculture, Ag Census Web Maps, Change in Number of Farms: 2007 to 2012

• Aquaculture in Virginia: Fish Hatcheries
• Hay in Virginia
• Corn in Virginia
• Wheat in Virginia

wheat, corn, and other grains were ground into more-digestible flour at mills powered by falling water
Source: National Park Service, A new look for Ed Mabry's mill

• Aldie Mill
• Native American women made corn bread after using a motar and pestle to grind corn kernels into flour, then mixing flour with water and heating over a fire
• colonists grew wheat, oats, barley, and other grains as well as corn, but processing the introduced grain seeds into edible food still required energy for grinding
• almost all Virginia mills were located in areas with topographic relief, where falling water powered a spinning wheel which rotated the grindstones
• Aldie is located at the edge of the Blue Ridge, where water flowing off the hard igneous bedrock hits softer sandstone deposited in a Triassic Basin
• a few mills in Tidewater, where topographic relief was limited, were powered by wind
• one miller with a pair of grindstones powered by water could do the work of many Native Americans grinding corn by hand, and mills were the first part of mechanization that reduced the demand for unskilled farm labor

the number of farms in Virginia is decreasing as farmland is converted to residential use or cut up by roads, or as farmers retire/die
Source: United States Department of Agriculture, Ag Census Web Maps, Change in Number of Farms: 2007 to 2012

• Virginia and Alcohol
• Grapes and Wine in Virginia
• Beer and Breweries in Virginia
• Hops in Virginia
• The "ABC" of Legal Liquor in Virginia
• Moonshine in Virginia

• Horses in Virginia
• Horse Racing and Gambling in Virginia

Video

Watch The Mill at Thoroughfare Gap from The Geography of Virginia.

Site Report

The vegetables and fruits for sale in your grocery store may have been shipped from California, Florida, Brazil, Argentina... but where is the farm or "agricultural production site" nearest to your site? Is there an actual farm near you, growing corn or hay or vegetables in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operation? Is someone raising cows or alpacas for profit? Is there a working forest nearby, where the trees will be harvested every 20-100 years?

Is the closest "agricultural location" a nursery growing plants for sale to surburbanites, a winery growing at least some of its own grapes, or a park (such as Temple Hall Farm Regional Park in Loudoun County/Frying Pan Park in Fairfax County, growing things mostly for visitors more than for production)? Hint: Check out "Farms" on Virginia Grown.

Is someone near you growing Christmas trees, to compete with the artificial ones already on sale in the stores? Do you have a neighbor raising birds or even snakes, for sale in pet stores? Is someone pasturing horses for more than personal use, or is a breeder producing pedigreed dogs/cats for sale? Is that empty field down the street being mowed occasionally just to minimize weeds, or is the grass collected for use as hay?

Remember, we're looking for production sites, not sales locations. This is not an exercise to find the nearest pet store selling goldfish, or a farmers market/fruit stand selling apple cider, or the nearest 7-11 selling apples grown - hmm, just where do they come from?

Describe, in your best judgment:
- what percentage of the land near (within 1/4-1/2 mile) of your site is agricultural vs. houses, retail stores, or industrial/office buildings
- is your nearest agricultural site surrounded by suburbia, soon to be swallowed up completely... or are houses concentrated on just one or two sides?
- what sort of impacts from nearby development affect your nearest agricultural site? Think joggers cut trails through the fields, reducing the farmer's return on investment? Are there are dogs that chase the livestock, or prevent raising of rabbits/chickens?
- can you identify if the "farmer" at your nearest site actually owns/operates the site, or if they are using the land just temporarily (such as the hay lease operators who maintain historic open-field landscapes at some national parks)?
- what products are produced at the agricultural site? Why are those products appropriate for that site? (For example, planting asparagus/fruit trees on a parcel planned for a new subdivision would not be cost effective, since it will take several years before the asparagus plants/trees might produce enough to justify the initial investment. Planting raspberry vines next to a hiking trail might provide a snack to strangers walking by, rather than a profit for the farmer.)

Finally, if you wanted to raise some sort of agricultural product for commercial sale, where would you locate your farm/ranch/orchard? Would you pick a place that's close to your site because you could keep your current job and farm on a part-time basis? Would you go far from Northern Virginia sprawl, so you would have many years to amortize your investments in the soil and farm equipment? What would you produce, and how much land would you need to buy in order to make a profit at farming?

Til Hazel, the most influential developer in Northern Virginia since George Washington, once plowed with horses and mules on his father's farm at Tyson's Corner. His father bought the land at Tysons before World War II, so the family could always feed itself in case the coming world war exacerbated the Great Depression.

Til Hazel tried to get his aunt to buy a nearby 95-acre dairy farm, but she said "what in the world would I want with a property way out in the country?"⁵

flax "retting" (rotting) at Mount Vernon, so stem's outer coat decays and workers can extract fibers to make linen
(flax was an alternative to growing just tobacco, tobacco, tobacco...)

References